For all but the most knowledgeable music fans, the three-minute Jay-Z commercial during the NBA
Finals might have seemed perplexing.

The black-and-white spot, seen on June 16, showed a rumpled Jay-Z exploring music in a
studio.

The viewer was left with a feeling of eavesdropping on a session as the rapper talked to
producers in poetic terms about an album.It ended with a cryptic message — “The Next Big Thing Is
Here” — and the website www. magnacartaholygrail.com.

What becomes clear at the site: The next Jay-Z album is titled
Magna Carta Holy Grail, with the commercial serving as an announcement of its July 4
release under an arrangement with Samsung.

The company will give away the first 1 million copies to owners of its cellphones. (Billboard has since announced that it won’t count the promotional copies in its chart
tallying.)

The mysterious tone of the ad and the secrecy surrounding the album’s production align with
recent trends in music marketing.

During the past six months, several major artists — David Bowie, Daft Punk and Kanye West — have
kept new albums under wraps and then mounted brief, intense campaigns aimed not at critics and
radio programmers but at Internet users, banking on their fans to pass along news.

Such viral marketing isn’t new.

Frontman Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails concocted an elaborate online scavenger hunt involving
codes on T-shirts and songs left on flash drives in bathrooms at concerts to promote the band’s
2007 album,
Year Zero.

The recent examples, though, are larger in scale and ambition, and seem to underscore what
marketing experts see as two trends: the decline of record sales as part of the income of musicians
and the rise of the artist as a branded commodity.

Jay-Z’s decision to let Samsung buy the first million copies of his record at a discounted price
and give them away is bound to boost his personal brand.

“It ain’t like there is a lot of money in selling records anyway,” said Steve Stoute, founder of
the marketing agency Translation. “If the music is shared and people like it, you are going to make
the money on tour.”

Mike King, who teaches marketing at Berklee College of Music in Boston, said that teasing fans
with tidbits, creating a sense of mystery and letting Internet buzz do the marketing circumvents
the critics and major media outlets that once set the agenda.

“It was ‘How can you engage with the gatekeepers?’ ” he said. “Now it’s ‘How do you remove
these gatekeepers and go directly to the fans?’ ”

Viral marketing tapped the treasure-hunting instinct that fans display when they scour the
Internet for pirated tracks, Stoute said.“The marketing of music today has been informed by the
process of how music was stolen,” he said.

Most albums are still marketed the old-fashioned way, with promotional copies distributed ahead
of release. Then the record label issues a single to radio stations a month or so before the album,
and the musician does interviews to generate publicity.

That paradigm seems to be changing or undergoing variations, at least with big-name artists.

Bowie kept his new album — two years in the making — a secret until Jan. 8 (his birthday). Then,
without fanfare, he released the single
Where Are We Now? and posted a surreal music video on YouTube. He did no interviews,
despite the fact that it was his first album in a decade.

Daft Punk, the French electronic duo famous for wearing robot headgear, also gave few hints that
it planned to release an album in May. The first clue came in February when the members posted a
picture on Facebook of their helmets fused together, along with the logo of their label, Columbia
Records.

By the time the single
Get Lucky was released to radio on April 19, the online buzz was in high gear, said Scott
Greer, Columbia’s vice president for marketing.

West was also coy about his new release,
Yeezus. He posted a May 1 update on Twitter, saying only “June Eighteenth,” which turned
out to be the issue date for the album.